Deshastha Brahmin - Social and Political Issues

Social and Political Issues

Maharashtraian Brahmins were absentee landlords and lived off the surplus without tilling the land themselves per ritual restrictions. They were often seen as the exploiter of the tiller. This situation started to change when the newly independent India enshrined in its constitution, agrarian or land reform. Between 1949–1959, the state governments started enacting legislation in accordance with the constitution implementing this agrarian reform or Kula Kayada in Marathi. The legislation led to the abolition of various absentee tenures like inams and jagirs. This implementation of land reform had mixed results in different States. On official inquiry, it was revealed that not all absentee tenures were abolished in the State of Maharashtra as of 1985. Other social and political issues include anti-Brahminism and the treatment of Dalits.

Read more about this topic:  Deshastha Brahmin

Famous quotes containing the words social and, social, political and/or issues:

    A man’s social and spiritual discipline must answer to his corporeal. He must lean on a friend who has a hard breast, as he would lie on a hard bed. He must drink cold water for his only beverage. So he must not hear sweetened and colored words, but pure and refreshing truths. He must daily bathe in truth cold as spring water, not warmed by the sympathy of friends.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    ... too much attention is paid to dress by those who have neither the excuse of ample means nor of social claims.... The injury done by this state of things to the morals and the manners of our lower classes is incalculable.
    Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)

    Regna regnis lupi, The State is a wolf unto the State. It is not a pessimistic lamentation like the old homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to Man], but a positive creed and political ideal.
    Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)

    The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.
    Susan Sontag (b. 1933)